Forget Big Brother…Facebook is Watching

It is no secret that I am not a “fan” of Facebook. Although I at one point was the owner of two Facebook accounts. One for busi­ness and the other for my per­sonal use. I never got the notion that so many peo­ple seem to have that Facebook is a daily, hourly, or by minute need. With all the recent issues with secu­rity peo­ple still seem to be just as enam­ored than ever with the social net­work.

This week marked the first “Quit Facebook Day” to stage a protest of sorts against FB’s lack of secu­rity, but accord­ing to reports it was a bust. People weren’t as eager to give up their online lives as orig­i­nally thought. I on the other hand had already attempted to break off that rela­tion­ship numer­ous times. Like a needy boyfriend who didn’t want to be let go of, end­ing a rela­tion­ship with Facebook is no easy task. After some deep inves­ti­gat­ing I did find an actual delete link which can be found here. The point of this post though is how Facebook has been given the power to track your every move. How so?

Practically every web­site we visit has a login through Facebook option on it. Although it seems pretty inno­cent if you did that sev­eral times on sev­eral dif­fer­ent sites it would be pos­si­ble to deter­mine pat­terns of your behav­ior as a Facebook user. Also with FB’s “like” but­ton fea­ture every time you click that link that is basi­cally sim­i­lar to using a vir­tual GPS of sorts. Facebook is able to know exactly where you go online. Not only exactly but what time, what day and how often. Is it just me or does that make any­one else uncom­fort­able?

I am all for new tech­nol­ogy. I began using com­put­ers back when all we had was the run and go to com­mands and desk­top pub­lish­ing was done only on the old Apples that were still called Macintosh’s. Advances in tech­nol­ogy are very excit­ing to me. Facebook is not one of those excit­ing things.

I do feel like we are essen­tially being watched. We put all our per­sonal infor­ma­tion eggs in one bas­ket so to speak and we trust that they will be taken care of. Except the prob­lem is, they aren’t. It has been proven numer­ous times that Facebook has deep secu­rity issues. So much so that it has led to the form­ing of a new term, “FaceCrook”. People who rob oth­ers based on their knowl­edge they obtained from Facebook. I wrote a post recently called, “What are you doing? Your Digital Footprint and what it could lead to,” dis­cussing the dan­gers of putting all our per­sonal infor­ma­tion on social net­works.

George Orwell wrote in the book 1984 which famously coined the phrase “Big Brother is watch­ing”:

“There was of course no way of know­ing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what sys­tem, the Thought Police plugged in on any indi­vid­ual wire was guess­work. It was even con­ceiv­able that they watched every­body all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire when­ever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assump­tion that every sound you made was over­heard, and, except in dark­ness, every move­ment scru­ti­nized.”

George Orwell’s words were hugely prophetic but for­get Big Brother, Facebook is watch­ing.

Thanks for read­ing,